


Red Gold

by gardnerhill



Series: A Study In Crimson [9]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Pirate Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-20 09:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1504937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you’ve just gotta say “Screw the Prime Directive.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Gold

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2014 JWP Practice Prompt #3: **Action!**

_BOOM!_

The top half of the _Merry Violet_ ’s mainmast cracked, split and fell to the screams of the crew as the _Baker_ swept past the sloop’s prow. The gunners Black Rat and Matew roared back at the crippled ship from behind the sole cannon the _Baker_ boasted. A row of rifles boomed in a line along the _Baker_ ’s gunwale, dropping a half-dozen of the _Violet’s_ men.

Out flew the grappling hooks and boards. Shear-Lock leaped over, sword first; the rest of the red crew flocked close behind, shouting in profane joy.

I held back a breath longer, still as a stalking cat save for my eyes sweeping the ambushed harrier prow to stern. There – a man aiming a rifle at our captain. I felled him with a shot, stuck my empty pistol in my belt, and hauled myself over the gunwale, scuttling across the boards like a nervous crab, holding no weapon, and into the fray.

At a flash of steel from the corner of my eye I swung up my left arm, and the sword-blade struck the back of my saw-hand with the ring of a bell and a bright flash of gold. Out came the cutlass, and with my sure knowledge of the man’s anatomy my opponent was dead in the next instant. I yanked the red blade out of his heart and swung it around to strike away the muzzle of another man’s pistol, following with a sweep of my saw-arm in an arc across the gunman’s face and chest. Back-cut, and he dropped, unspooling and gurgling at the pain from his spilled entrails. Blade hard under his left ear, sweep, and the gurgling scream stopped as he toppled with a spray of blood.

I looked up to a cutlass driving for my own breast, and flung my saw-hand to knock it sideways. Blinding pain scraped along my side as I felt the blade strike a rib. Yelling in rage and pain, I swept my gold-flashing red saw back and up, and that red-gold snaggle-toothed blade was the last thing that sailor’s left eye ever beheld.

I wrenched away from the screaming man and turned, to find the rest of the sloop’s crew defeated – nearly all dead and the few survivors bound. The deck was spattered in blood where it was not pooled and mingled with effluvia like my poor pistoller. Bakers moved among the bodies, some of them clutching bleeding wounds or limping; I was not the only one reddened by combat. The skirmish was over.

I felt no pity for the victims of our assault, nor horror for the work we had done. The _Merry Violet_ was one of the sleek little sharks that preyed upon coastal towns, striking hard, fast and brutally, the men aboard her only knaves and cutthroats who could also reef a sail. But when Murray in the crow had spotted the sloop, Shear-Lock had called all hands and readied the raid, and I was at the ready with them.

The bound sloop-men stared with terror – not at the tall striking figure of Captain Shear-Lock who stood before them, but at my saw-hand in its gold housing. “Gold-Hand,” two whispered; “ _El Mano de Oro_ ,” another said like a curse.

Gold-Hand? How could they speak of me as if they had heard of me before?

“The porters, Jack,” Shear-Lock said. His face was set and grim.

Porters? …Then I remembered the men aboard the _Nightingale_ , the night Shear-Lock and I had killed two Octaviuses and displayed them from the yardarm. My glinting-gold saw-hand must have seared into their memory, and the story had spread in that port like fire on a tarred sheet.

Angel spread out the mean booty of the _Merry Violet_. A bloodied wig from the _Violet_ ’s captain, shot before we’d boarded. A few baubles and carved whalebones; sailor’s slops. No gold, no treasure. Such men turned any available wealth into rum, dice and women as fast as they could – starving dogs bolting a stolen meal and snarling with hunger once more. No profit for the _Baker_ here. Shear-Lock picked up the wig and turned his back on the rest of the meager pile.

But then Gregson and Hopkins approached Shear-Lock, grinning and dragging a body behind them of a small, dark-faced and dark-haired man. “Found him, Cap’n!” Hopkins called.

Shear-Lock glanced at the corpse of the pirate. “Powder burns on thumbs and fingers. Smell of powder and smoke in his very skin where it has burnt in. Worn notch in his teeth where he has held the fuse.” He took hold of a limp right wrist and skinned the corpse’s sleeve to reveal a tattoo of an albatross, and nodded in satisfaction. “Little luck that brought you in the end, gunner’s mate Hector Alonso – late of the _Octavius_.”

The survivors stared in terror at the body, almost as if they feared the dead man as much as they did me. Several murmured the ship’s name, as they looked at me and the rest of the Bakers.

Realisation dawned on me. The whole story was spreading – not just tales of some terrible gold-handed buccaneer but what ties Gold-Hand had to the destruction of the _Octavius,_ and the curse of death upon all its old crewmen.

“Captain’s gig?” Shear-Lock called.

“Abaft, sir,” Angel called back from the stern.

Shear-Lock looked at the five surviving Violets. “In you go.”

Gregson stepped forward. “Cap’n, no! We can cut their–”

“Belay that, bos’n’s mate,” Shear-Lock said coolly without looking toward Gregson. “The _Octavius_ dog is dead. Let these men spread the word. You have a mass burial to attend to.”

Gregson stepped back, mule-faced.

Not an hour after the bound men (including the now one-eyed man who’d wounded me) were in the open boat and drifting away from their conquered ship, Shear-Lock strode back aboard the _Baker_ as the last returning member of the raiding party, the _Violet_ captain’s papers under his arm and the bloodied peruke perched atop his head. Soon afterward flames roared up from one end of the _Merry Violet_ to the other. We’d given the miserable dogs a Viking funeral, better than they’d deserved.

“Surgeon’s Mate!” I roared, letting the pain of my gash add spurs to my voice. It was high time Wiggins learned how to stitch a wound.

***

“Moriarty is right about you, Jack,” Shear-Lock berated. “Your soft heart is your undoing. If you hadn’t taken that extra two seconds to cut your man’s throat you would not have taken that injury.” The captain himself had not taken a scratch in the raid – a neat turnaround from the very first raid I’d joined as a Baker, where I’d come out unscathed only to find I’d inadvertently saved Shear-Lock’s life.

I cursed at the pain while a shaking, pale-faced Wiggins attended to my gashed side. Murray stood behind and offered suggestions for the stitches as if I was a sail to be basted back together. With the ship’s surgeon undergoing his own treatment it fell upon Angel and Hector to take up the slack of treating the few other wounded Bakers. No amputations, no deaths; I was relieved that a treasureless raid had not cost lives nor limbs among the crew.

I’d expected more grumbling and anger from the men around me, because we’d gained nothing from the attack except another dead Octavius and some terrified storytellers. But Angel hummed some Cameroonian air while he bandaged Dix’s leg; the other men were either at their posts or watching my stitching, and they were content. No; they were downright jovial. High in the crow’s nest I heard another snatch of song, echoed back from the men in the rigging.

I looked around at the other Bakers who stood with me, and thought of how I had leaped at the chance to join the fray. Despite the pain of the wound and the clumsy stitching, I regretted nothing. And I understood why Shear-Lock had raided this sloop – and wasn’t even very angry or concerned about my injury.

How long since my rescue from Moriarty – how long had we been running and hiding instead of striking boldly, at those who needed to be struck? How long since… since we had been _pirates_?

I looked Shear-Lock in the eye. He, too, looked to be on a far more even keel. “You enjoyed that, Cap’n.”

“As did you, Jack.” The captain grinned. “I will not deny the utter satisfaction I took in treading upon a cockroach.”

Wiggins snipped the last bit of thread. “Well done, surgeon’s mate,” I said, surveying the wobbly, crooked stitches that would leave me with a unique scar. “Rum for me, grog for you.”

Wiggins nodded, grinned sickly, and fainted.

Shear-Lock and I burst out laughing, as did a number of the men. “Brave lad,” I said, chuckling as Angel settled in to bandage me. “And at least he didn’t vomit the way I did at my first surgery.”  



End file.
